The residential community-focused marketing service provider QinLin (亲邻科技) has completed a tens of millions yuan Series A+ from Shangshi Fund, with PhoenixTree Capital serving as the exclusive financial advisor.
“The capital raised in this round will be mainly used for market expansion, product development and operation in residential communities,” said GUAN Ke, CEO of QinLin.
Founded in January 2015, QinLin secures its portal for advertisers to precisely target their potential customers in residential communities by dishing out “FREE” smart management solutions for established residential communities.
“A paid model doesn’t mesh with our goal of rapid expansion, that’s why we went with the option of giving the solutions out for free,” explained GUAN to KrASIA. At the same time, the property management companies, an essential element in the residential community ecosystem, get to reinforce their security systems with zero cost.
Specifically, the company builds the infrastructure for its marketing business by installing front gates, on which an advertising light box is fitted, and smart access control systems, which can only be unlocked with the app the company supplies for. This combination has clearly enabled the company to reach customers in residential communities through both offline and online channels. AR is also employed for ad displaying in a bid to make its ad stand out.
“The one and the only way to reach the most customers in a residential community is through its entrance,” said GUAN.
An ad lightbox right at the entrance of a residential community helps to channel offline traffic to advertisers’ online platforms through, for example, the users’ scanning QR codes for coupons and interaction, according to GUAN.
Traditional marketing in residential communities, which oftentimes takes the form of renting open physical space in residential communities for ad displaying, falls short in terms of interaction with residents. Plus, the requirements of advertisers are now becoming more nuanced, say brand building or promotion. At the same time, they demand “precise targeting” and high conversion rate, both of which undoubtedly would be an impossible event without the support of internet technologies.
For this reason, the company developed its self-serving advertising management platform QADN, which is consolidated with such elements as IoT, clouding computing and map data and allows advertisers to book advertising slot directly online. With this platform, the advertisers can then target precisely the desired customers by applying the filters like target customer base and the nature of relevant residential communities.
By integrating IoT and cloud computing technologies into the platform, the pool of data on residents is also enriched, which can, in turn, be further leveraged to achieve the goal of precise targeting.
Well, if you are worried about your data security, the data are in effect managed by property management companies and the data used by QinLin are all masked. In addition, the company is also thinking about bringing in blockchain technology to improve data security.
By the end of 2017, the company had already built its presence in over 20,000 residential communities in 60 cities across China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, and inked deals with 300+ advertisers, according to data provided by the company. It has also partnered up with Evergrande Group, Wanda Plaza, and China Resources.
2018 will see the company expand into 100 cities, with its presence built in over 1,000 residential communities in each major city. In the ensuing three years, the company looks to branch out into community services, establishing its own residential community-focused business ecosystem “QinLin Business+”.
The three-year-old startup is said to have obtained over 18 patents for its research results and has been admitted as national high-tech enterprise in 2017. Its core team is made up of members with over 10 years of experience in the field of marketing and its hardware team is comprised of members who have been researching and developing access control systems and automated door systems for over 15 years. The team for developing and maintaining its platform consists of talents from the field of big data maintenance and IoT.